An Impossible Love

At the end of the fifties in Châteauroux, Rachel, an office worker, meets Philippe, who comes from a bourgeois family. He is clever, attractive and has no intention of marrying her, and he says so about the class difference too. Chantal is born from the affair. Philippe refuses to recognise the girl for years, Rachel raises her alone, and then he comes back. The film runs in three parts: love, then solitary motherhood, then what the daughter has to say. What emerges in the last part relocates every scene we have watched and opens the account between mother and daughter. The real subject is not love but how many times a woman is made to retell her own story because of class and sex. Catherine Corsini directed, adapting Christine Angot's novel with Laurette Polmanss. Virginie Efira plays Rachel and Niels Schneider plays Philippe. It opened in France on 7 November 2018 and runs 135 minutes. Who it is for: anyone who likes French drama and mother-and-daughter stories spread across thirty years. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot approach the subject. Incest is at the centre of the film, the telling is cold, and the first half runs long.